Case Number 22814

BLUE VELVET (BLU-RAY)

The Charge

Opening Statement

Over 25 years after it first blew audiences' minds, David Lynch's Blue
Velvet arrives on Blu-ray with a stunning transfer and some must-see bonus
features. It's like the movie is brand new again.

Facts of the Case

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan, Showgirls) returns home to his
quiet town from college after his father's health fails, and isn't home for long
at all before making a chilling discovery in the field near the hospital: a
severed human ear laying in the grass. After taking the ear to the police,
Jeffrey and wholesome teenager Sandy (Laura Dern, We Don't Live Here Any
More) drawn into a mystery involving a damaged nightclub singer (Isabella
Rossellini, Wyatt Earp), a psychotic criminal (Dennis Hopper,
Speed) and, of course, the owner of the ear.

The Evidence

David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet might just be the most important
movie in his very impressive filmography. Though Eraserhead helped
announce him and both Dune and The Elephant Man found him
attempting to mesh his very particular sensibilities with a commercial aesthetic
(one more successfully than the other), it was Blue Velvet that really
provided his breakthrough and helped establish what we mean when talking about a
"David Lynch movie." It's the mixture of squareness mixed with the
surreal that he would become known for, and marked the first time he couched his
bizarre imagery in a mystery. It introduces nearly all of the elements that
would make Twin Peaks a cult phenomenon when it premiered on TV just a
few years later, and the one-two punch of Blue Velvet and Twin
Peaks is most likely what Lynch will be remembered for. The rest of his body
of work is a series of variations on similar themes.

Twenty-five years after it first premiered, Blue Velvet remains a
masterpiece. While it's now become old hat to examine the seedy underbelly
lurking beneath the plastic facade of suburbia (or something profound like
that), it's never been done darker or better or more explicitly than it is here
-- look no further than the opening shots, in which the camera pans from rows of
perfect houses and lush, green, manicured lawns down into the grass, where we
find a severed human ear swarming with ants. That's the beauty of David Lynch:
he's interested in the ants, but he loves the lawns, too. There's a tendency to
read some of the sunnier aspects of Lynch's movies as irony -- that he's somehow
making fun of optimism or sweetness, and that it's in the dark stuff where his
heart really lies. Maybe some viewers are unable to accept the dichotomy at work
in a movie like Blue Velvet, and in order to make sense of Lynch's world,
they assume that half of it is satire (those are the viewers not already turned
off by the darker stuff, which they'll dismiss as weirdness for the sake of
weirdness). What I've always loved about David Lynch, though, is that he's
utterly sincere about all of it. He means it. Watching Kyle McLachlan's Jeffrey
navigate the two worlds existing in Blue Velvet is like watching Lynch
himself at work -- he's a sweet, clean-cut guy who is inextricably drawn to his
own dark impulses.

While it's not without its eccentricities -- I can't imagine how some
audiences must have reacted in 1986 -- Blue Velvet is one of the most
accessible of Lynch's films. The introduction of the mystery element may be the
movie's masterstroke, as it allows us to suspend our disbelief and go along with
some of the more bizarre detours; we're OK with not always knowing what's going
on or why we're seeing what we're seeing, because Jeffrey is in the same boat.
And though he wouldn't find his signature role until playing Special Agent Dale
Cooper until Twin Peaks, his third collaboration with Lynch (following
Dune and this one), MacLachlan's work is excellent here, too. He has to
seem so normal and all-American, while at the same time be believable as a guy
who's willingly drawn into a dark underworld and masochistic relationship with
Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy (who is good and fearless in the movie, but who
has always been my least favorite thing about Blue Velvet). Then, of
course, there is Frank Book, the villain played by the late Dennis Hopper,
without whom I'm not entirely sure we would still be talking about the film a
quarter of a century later. There is nothing subtle or layered about Hopper's
performance: he is pure, crazy evil, and he's a blast. In a movie filled with
memorable scenes and moments (like all of Lynch's movies), there is nothing more
memorable in Blue Velvet then Frank Booth.

MGM's new Blu-ray of Blue Velvet is stunning, offering a full HD AVC
encoded 1080p transfer that brings the movie to new life: Lynch's vibrant color
palette pops like never before, dark sequences are clear and maintain their
definition and fine detail and textures are noticeable like never before. Though
the image is a little soft in some spots, it can mostly be attributed to the
source and Lynch's artistic decisions. The lossless DTS-HD master audio track is
also terrific, which is a relief -- the importance of sound in a David Lynch
film cannot be understated. Though Blue Velvet isn't as sonically dense
as some of his later films (namely Mulholland Dr. and Lost
Highway), there is a great deal of care and subtlety that went into this
track. Dialogue is clear and audible throughout, the songs and gorgeous score
(by frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti) is always well-balanced and many
of the surround effects are effective and, at times, even ominous. No one knows
how to unsettle with sound quite like David Lynch.

By now, you probably already know the main reason why you should upgrade to
the Blu-ray of Blue Velvet: nearly an hour's worth of never-before-scene
deleted material has been uncovered and included for the first time. Though much
of it doesn't work and deserved to have been cut from the finished movie, the
material provides a fascinating look into the movie that Blue Velvet
could have been, reminding us just how fine a line there is between timeless
masterpiece and forgettable mess, and how that line is so often drawn in the
editing room. Fans of the film and of Lynch will eat this stuff up, but students
of film could actually learn a lot from going through the deleted scenes as
well. The discovery of this footage, crazy as it may be at times, is a gift that
we must not take for granted.

But it doesn't stop there. Also included is an excellent hour-long
retrospective documentary called "Mysteries of Love," previously
included on the Special Edition DVD, some very short
"vignettes" (each runs under a minute), some amusing outtakes
(presented in HD), a clip of Siskel and Ebert reviewing the movie on At the
Movies (Ebert notoriously dislikes the movie, and even more so in '86) and a
gallery of trailers and TV spots.

Closing Statement

Between the A/V upgrade and the hour of deleted material, the Blu-ray of
Blue Velvet isn't just the best version of the movie ever released, it's
almost a complete reassessment. Whether you've never seen the movie or if you
already own it on DVD, watching it on Blu-ray is like seeing it for the first
time. Especially if you've never seen it. What I'm saying is this: the movie is
great, and the Blu-ray comes highly recommended.